Hi all love your products sorry to see that you are not currently producing new stuff. I discovered paper terrain about 10 months ago from a company doing a kickstarter. I know another company, I hear you are not very friendly toward other paper terrain companies. I just wanted you to know that I have recently purchased a lot of your stuff because I found out about you all after I got involved with paper terrain from another company. It is concerning to me that this tiny industry can't work together to try and grow the fan base. I want more stuff, more than you are producing. I am an adult and can afford more than one companies offering's. I was very disappointed at your reaction to helping out your own industry. You are not going to get new customers by putting up a web address and selling old material and dissing your rivals as you obviously see them. Thanks for having some nice stuff. I hope to pick up the rest of your line-up eventually.

Welcome aboard. I'm glad you've found some stuff you like. I think if you look around, you'll see that WWG does NOT speak poorly of other vendors. They've always been respectful as far as I recall. Have you seen otherwise? It is unfortunate that the major makers of terrain don't collaborate more, but you may find its more complicated than any one side may let on.

I do hope you find WWG offerings as awesome as I do, and I hope you get to experience the community's support if you need it! We try to be a friendly and helpful bunch.

Sorry if my post comes out wonky. It's hard to type on an iPhone...

Welcome! I would say more but mproteau said it rather well.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

Your stuff is great. My dream is to be able to pick up any random published RPG adventure and be able to build the site as described. I am doing well toward that. But I'm not their yet. I need a lot more stuff, and it has to come from multiple sources. I want to see this industry grow and be healthy and I hope you all get your problems solved and resume new work soon. Thank you for all the great stuff you have produced I will be picking up your stuff a little every month until I have all the fantasy related stuff.

Just to make this very clear, there is no problem at all if you want to talk about any companies kickstarter or work here. The only thing we enforce is the no direct web links to competing companies products and no pictures of cardstock terrain that do not feature some WWG items prominently displayed.

If you look you will see, there have been a number of posts and pictures including items from Dave's Games, One Monk, WotC and Dwarven Forge, that have been directly complimented by staff.

Copying new products discourages innovation and creativity by eroding the revenue available to the innovators.

Some of this industries finest creators have left for another industry - the copying that has occurred is likely to have been a factor in their departure.

- If you believe the copying I mentioned has not occurred, please tell us.
- If you believe the copying has not been harmful to this industry, please explain your reasoning.

Complain about the rule against linking to competitors on this forum if you will.
Complain about criticism of a specific behaviour by an unnamed competitor if you will.

But behind all this is the disappointment that the best innovators and creators in this industry have left for other pursuits.

Would Denny and the rest of the WWG crew still be here if that competitor had not behaved the way it has? Perhaps; perhaps not.
- Either way, please keep this in mind when continuing this discussion.

By your reasoning the whole open source movement could never have been successful and should have killed off the whole computer industry, instead of being a major driver of innovation.

Innovation does not blossom in isolation. It is based on enhancing the ideas of others. Especially for a hobby such as ours.

And no, I don't believe your copying claims without solid proof, and no I don't believe it has anything to do with Denny's decisions to go into video gaming either.

I will believe this hobby is a niche market and that the innovative ways with which WWG tried to enhance their business (TLX and Terraclips) did not bring the expected success. Why they 'failed' is open for discussion, but not because the competition blatantly copied them, as both systems are unique up to this day.

If I read all of this correctly you are implying that because WWG put out a castle set that had brick textures and the other vendor put out a castle set that had brick textures that this is copying even though most medevil castles have brick textures. The same would apply to dungeon sets, and outdoor sets. That simply because WWG put out these things first that no one else had a right to do castles, dungeon walls or trees. I mean guys trees look like trees and bricks look like bricks, WWG did not invent either of these concepts they simple modeled their designs after historical models of them. I guess if you follow this theory then most of the RPG related material that has been published in the last 40 years is copying somebody. If you all want to grow your business the only way to do that is to grow the papercrafting industry to get more hardcore papercrafters. with each company putting out less than $100 worth of new material each year it is likely that a hardcore papercrafter will buy the offering of both or all companies to get the things he/she needs to make their models. Again I will say I like your offerings I bought 2 more sets last night and I intend to continue each pay period picking up a set or two. I am sorry that your lead designer found a better job, because I like your material but as a consumer I can state that I want choices, and very often more often than not in fact I end up choosing both.

@lady.dragona - I was going to make much the same point you made. I agree with you. Anyone who wants to do terrain on their own needs to build up their own library of products, and doing so requires covering the same iconic terrain types that everyone else would make.

However, I think there's a lot of history here, and for some, there's a striking relationship not only to the general theme of sets, but to both the specific content of sets, the specific format of sets and the specific timing of sets. I've never done any research deep enough to see whether it's all just sour grapes or something real. I did have to pick my jaw up off the floor one day when I got an email displaying a WWG product under a different vendor's name, only to realize it was a complete knock-off of a WWG product. But, it is what it is. Still (and to get back to your original points about any bad blood between terrain makers) I don't think the folks of WWG have ever had anything negative to say about other venders about any of this.

But, this aspect of the conversation seems fairly unrelated to kickstarter projects in general, so I don't know if moderators want to branch the conversation or just shut it down. I doubt anything good will come of it. If anyone is in the metro-west area of Massachusetts and would like to talk about this stuff over a beer, then THAT I would whole-heartedly support.

I'm a fan of WWG because of the quality work put in by Denny and his crew. I have talked to Denny about some of this stuff.

In his opinion there isn't enough income for full time employment. He determined that there was a lot more profit in real production rather than digital. (It costs just as much to design and distribute both real and digital products, but real products have far higher sales volumes and thus are more profitable even with narrower margins because you are selling to distributors. There is a great book by the founder of Mongoose that explains all this.)

So, he works full time, and uses his spare time to run World Works Games. That has to be very draining. (I contract engineer for $150 a hour, but I'd rather not... Its what I do by day. As far as I'm concerned contracting for a boat load of cash, sucks.)

I'm reasonably certain that Denny was hoping that real terrain would take off and he would shift to full time employment with WWG. I guess that hasn't happened.

I have no idea why anyone would bring up open source. Open Source by definition is copying. Copy copy copy. I also don't consider it a vehicle for innovation. I've blown more money on open source than I care to say, and I have one open source program at home at this time.

I have no idea about who if anyone is copying anything. But if someone is doing cheap cheap cheap products with crappy textures, then I'm sure it would be damaging to WWG high end texture work.

"Bad blood" is bad for business.

Getting your customers involved in petty ancient territorial squabbles is [and has been] death.

Get over it.

[This is absolutely my last post on this topic, forever.]

How any American can complain about someone copying a successful business model is beyond me. Isn't that what capitalism is all about Anyway, all those paper castle terrains are just cheap knock off's of the Warhammer castle our group had 25 years ago

And I find it ironic that in the end Denny did run a successful Kickstarter (yes, I'm back on topic), but only to leave the papercraft business. If Kickstarter had been open for Canadian companies a little earlier things might have turned out quite differently. Too bad as I'm heavily invested in Terraclips, having 2 copies of each set.

Regarding piracy, that guy might actually have been right. Most pirated copies are made by people who would not buy the set anyway, and thus are not lost sales. Whether they pirate or not does not matter for the WWG sales. They might even expose some people to the hobby enough so that they become interested and start buying. Although I very much doubt it. And yes, it just feels wrong. But my belief is that the people who are dedicated enough to build paper terrain, like and support their hobby and have no problem paying for it, even if they could download a pirated copy for free. So I doubt piracy is really that much of an issue. But our community is small, very small. The Kickstarters of FDG, although successful, had each less than 500 backers so far. This forum has less than 4000 registered members, with quite a lot of them no longer active in the papercraft hobby. Those are very small numbers.

Guys (And I'm including some of the Mods here) Lets get back on the topic of Kickstarters here.

The topic of if another supplier copied WWG, is NOT productive here.

I understand that there is pain when people see something well liked move to a new stage, and everyone has their pet theory why, but this forum has almost always been a friendly place for everyone, lets not dissolve into bickering/a new edition war at this point.

I think all views have been stated, if anyone wants to talk more please do it over PM.

Thank you.

Thank you scrubkai.

In other news, I just received a notice about two new KS's, one for minis and one for an rpg;


Tome of Horrors - minis from the complete Tome of Horrors. No greens on the front page, lots of decent concept art and a good selection of sculptors names there. My favorite is the Disenchanter.




"Fall of Man is a post apocalyptic-gothic-horror-fantasy RPG set on ruined Earth. Pathfinder and other systems compatible." I've been a big Gamma World fan forever and gone, but not of the fantasy apocalypse type. Looks like a big mashup of everything so it might be fun. I like their social media incentives where if they get enough 'likes' on their Facebook page they'll give all backers extra goodies; clever bit of fan marketing incentive.

Yes I agree with you guys they haven't sent me my first set and now they want more money they need to wait til they have finished the first one to start begging for more money.

I don't know how that company runs their business, but Mantic Games ran multiple kick starters (DeadZone and Mars Attacks) without Deadzone shipping yet.

Though they ran their Dreadball KS, though I wasn't really into Kickstarter at the time and do not know if they started Deadzone before the Dreadball was finished.

Does anyone know how stable Centerstage Mini's is? Are they a large enough company to handle doing multiple kick starters?

I was going to try to get into this one because I missed the first one, but if there are doubts as to the viability of the company…. then I may just pass this one by...

The people that backed the Demons and Devils KS by them have some pretty poignant feelings toward CSM. I missed all that and back for ToH1 (I have one of almost everything headed my way eventually).

I am not backing ToH2 due to a combination of reasons (available funds, company working on many Kickstarters, etc.)

That being said, I heard they are helping out Torn Armor and that seems like a good thing.

They seem like a big enough company that getting things eventually seems likely, but on-time seems improbable at best.

Thanks Talae, a more concise answer to my question.

I'm just curious if anyone has any stats on how often Kickstarters don't work out?

Out of over 30 projects, I have 6 that did not make the cut - withdrawn, cancelled, never made their $ goal, whatever.

Yes there have been a few that have shot (way) past their timeline for expected completion and delivery (a couple of them by over a year, but they are still working on it - and a couple more are movies still in development). Even the OGRE designer Edition by Steve Jackson Games took a lot longer than expected - but then it was having to deal with overseas manufacturing (China).

The two worst "offenders" for me are still yet unfinished. NecroDice, where the developer has had both significant personal IRL problems as well difficulties in the product physical development. Torn Armor where their contracted factory supplier has left them high and dry - but they are still determined to bring the project to completion, and have been on the receiving end of a fantastic amount of support from the community of gaming developers to help them through their difficulty!

As to accuracy of shipment, the original Reaper Bones had a couple or so missing or damaged pieces, but which they quickly rectified without hassle. There were a couple other side-piece goodies issues with other programs which were due more to missing mailing addresses or lost emails than anything else.

Everthing sent has otherwise arrived in good order with no damage via delivery.

Overall, I am happy with my Kickstarter experience and do not feel like I've been bilked or "had" by any of the project leaders.

I hope this answers your question or assuages any concerns you may have. Again, this has been MY Kickstarter experience. You may have run into some snafu or situation far different than mine.

I haven't seen any official statistics -- I wouldn't expect KS to emphasize it (unless it were unbelievably good).

My personal experience:
* Backed 45 projects that got funding
* 21 have delivered. Of those, maybe one or two were strictly on time. Several more were 'sorta' on time.
* Maybe 8-10 haven't hit deadline yet.
* The others look like they will deliver (good explanations for the delay, continued publicized progress, etc.).

I really only have one that I'm skeptical (game being developed by a small team that I think is out of its depth).

So my experience is so far a 0% failure, but likely to be 2%.

Steve